Back Home

By Steve Burton

Back Home is the story of a group of musicians/songwriters
who formed a band in the early 70s in S.LC., Utah. They
backed Freddy Fender in concert in 1976 and then toured
Canada on their own for (8) months, finally landing in the San
Francisco Bay Area. This book is a depiction of their exploits. They
had (1) album in 1984 under the name of Touch of Texas : Live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462874743

Steve Burton

Steve obtained an attorney when he got back to Utah and pursued a claim against the Army for false imprisonment and false arrest. A final review of this action by a former Supreme Court justice for the State of Utah revealed that the government has sovereign immunity in these types of cases. Had Steve resisted the haircut at Fort Carson and been beaten with the billy clubs, he would have had a case. Steve went to work for the government, in lieu of joining the Weathermen, in order to try to change the system from within. He continued to play music, helping to form a group in Utah called Back Home. Back Home eventually toured all over the western U.S., Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Alaska, finally coming to rest in the San Francisco Bay area. Steve lived in the Silicon Valley for twenty years, where he worked for the government for twenty years. He followed his grand kids to Las Vegas, Nevada in 2000. He has written two books, “Cannon Fodder” and “Back Home”. Steve continues working as a Construction Inspector for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service at four Refuges within 100 miles of Las Vegas and plays music when he can.

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Copyright © 2011 by Steve Burton.

ISBN: Softcover    978-1-4628-7473-6

ISBN: Ebook        978-1-4628-7474-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Chapters 1 Through 12—Utah

Chapters 13 Through 27—Canada I

Chapters 28 Through 40—California I, Canada II & Alaska

Chapters 41 Through 66—California II

Follow-Up

Appendix A—Lyrics From Back Home Original Songs

Appendix B—Artists Covered By Back Home

Appendix C—Touch Of Texas Song List

Appendix D—Songs On Touch Of Texas Live Album

DEDICATED TO GEORGE LEE SMITH (1943-2001)

PROLOGUE

Only a few bands have the good fortune and the luck to have a long term ensemble experience and the satisfaction that results from that experience. Back Home was such a band.

Back Home was meant to be a frame of mind, rather than a particular place. Similar to the salmon, who are washed out to sea and then follow some mysterious instinct to attempt to find their way back to the stream where they were born.

While other musicians came and went, the core group of Scott Sweeten, Steve Burton and Leroy Smith remained together through many adventures and numerous challenges. They never achieved the notoriety they deserved, but their accomplishments should still be considered a success. They touched many peoples lives. This is their story.

UTAH

1

It was the summer of 1970 and I had just been honorably discharged from the Army. I was back home in Salt Lake City with a new wife and baby, no car and no job. I was twenty-six years old. For the past ten years I had always played music, in addition to whatever else I might be doing. Now, that was gone too.

After sending out many resumes and beating the street, I finally landed a job with Ketchum’s Hardware for $75.00/week. I caught the bus every day from a duplex apartment on Highland Drive, which we had found to rent.

The apartment was close to A Razor’s Edge men’s hair styling shop where my wife, Susan, had returned to her profession of styling men’s hair. This was still a fairly new phenomenon resulting from the long hairstyles of the late sixties now becoming mainstream.

In order for her to return to work, we arranged for her sister Gloria to baby-sit our son, Troy, during the day and live with us. Susan’s dad loaned her an old Dodge Lancer, which he had kept around for his kids to learn to drive with. She used this to go to work and to the grocery store, but we didn’t dare take it much further.

Since I had no vehicle, I started hanging out at a bar across the street from our duplex called the Sandpiper. A guy named Pete Lucas owned this place. Once he heard my story, he set out to try to get me together with a couple of musicians he knew from a group called The Bellshannymen.

The Bellshannymen was a folk group who had been together since they were kids. After being very successful in Salt Lake City at the Holiday Inn adjacent to the airport, Holiday Inns had hired them to tour the country opening lounges with live music everywhere in the nation.

Similar to the Osmonds with Andy Williams, they had worked with Arthur Godfrey, recorded an album in 1968, been regular performers at Disneyland and Marineland and performed at Hootenannies all over the country.

After all that, the group had broken up and two of the members had remained on the road while the rest returned to Salt Lake. The two who had continued on the road had now just recently returned to Salt Lake, just like me, and Pete Lucas realized that we had that in common. He wanted to capitalize on their notoriety and have them perform at the Sandpiper. Pete introduced me to Jack Peterson and Leroy Smith and they agreed to a get acquainted session at my place.

Our duplex was actually an old Victorian house that the landlord had made into two apartments. My little sister, Sue, and one of her friends had just moved to Salt Lake from Price, Utah to seek their fortune. When it became available, they moved in to the other apartment. There was a basement room at the rear of the house and by knocking out a dividing wall, I created a large whitewashed room to be utilized for music sessions, which was accessible from both apartments. This is where Jack, Leroy and I formed a trio, which we named Peterson, Burton and Smith, or PBS.

PBS was Jack on guitar and banjo, Leroy on bass, and me on drums, with all of us singing on practically every song. Leroy also performed stand up comedy with Jack as his straight man. We were a great show group, playing to standing room only for over a year at the Sandpiper.

After that we decided to take a month off to learn some new songs. This was January of 1972 and we had all of the equipment set up in the whitewashed room in the basement, where we practiced every weekend.

Late one night, during the middle of the week, I was up late watching television and everyone else was asleep. I had all of the lights out, so when the TV went dark, the whole place was dark. Thinking that the TV had gone out, I went to a wall switch and attempted to turn on a light. That didn’t work either. About that time I caught a whiff of smoke and went to the kitchen to investigate. The smell was stronger in there so I opened the basement door a crack and flames came to life on the other side. I pulled the door back shut and hollered for Susan and Gloria to take the baby and get out now. We woke up the neighbors and they called the fire department and let Susan, Gloria and the baby stay with them. Meanwhile, I ran to the front door of the other apartment and woke up my sister and her roommate, Juanita. They weren’t thinking straight because Juanita was more worried about how she was dressed than getting out of a burning house. I finally convinced them of the urgency and they went to the neighbors too.

Now I kept running back and forth in front of the house and looking down the street for the fire department. When they finally got there, I went to the neighbors’ house as well. It was then that someone pointed out to me that I was barefoot wearing only a tee shirt and jeans. I had been running around on the ice and snow. My adrenaline was pumping so hard that I hadn’t even noticed the cold.

The fire department eventually determined that faulty wiring caused the fire. When the landlord decided to split the old house into two apartments, he didn’t rewire the place to handle the requirements of two households, i.e. two stoves, two fridges, two microwaves . . . etc., so the wiring was overloaded and eventually burned through the insulation and started the fire.

Our musical equipment was all destroyed, except that I was able to salvage the wooden shells of my Ludwig drums and have them recovered. Susan and I spent hours dipping and polishing the chrome fittings and rims so they could be reused. My cymbals lost their temper and became brittle and broke into chunks. There were some tires down in the basement, so the fire became very hot and intense. The smell was terrible and permeated the entire house. I’ll never forget it.

The landlord’s insurance covered only the structure, not the contents. We could have sued him but neither Leroy nor I had the means to do that. Jack Peterson, on the other hand, was successful in turning in a claim to his homeowner’s insurance to recoup his losses. The hitch was that he had to state that he was not playing music professionally. His insurance may have collected from the landlord—we never knew for sure. Anyway, Jack never played again to my knowledge.

Leroy had just purchased a new bass amplifier and had made only one payment. The night of the fire, one of the hardest things that I had to do was call him and inform him that his new amp had been reduced to ashes. I’ll never forget his reply. He said, Well, sometimes when things like this happen it’s for a reason. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what it is.

2

After I rebuilt my drums, I heard about a country band playing on Redwood Road, who needed a drummer, so I bit the bullet and crossed that line. I had played big band jazz in high school and college, blues and swing with the Continentals, polkas and western swing with the Melody Four, early rock and rockabilly with the Bonnevilles, show tunes with the Andrini Brothers, 60’s rock and British invasion with the Scholars, soul and jazz with the Esquires, high-powered rock and roll show on the road with Promises-Promises and finally, folk rock and comedy with PBS. Ever since I had come to Salt Lake City it had been made clear to me that if anybody ever found out that you had played country music, you would never be considered for any other style. So I had to want to play pretty bad to take the gig at the Red Devil on Redwood Road, playing on weekends.

The pay was good and the guitar player was pretty good, but the bass player and the lead singer were bad alcoholics. The bass player commuted every weekend from Ephraim, Utah and would start off well enough every night, but would be drunk and falling asleep leaning against the wall, as he sat on his amplifier, by the end of the night. The lead singer, who also was the leader of the band, could sing all right as long as he stayed sober, but by the end of the night he was stumbling around the stage and forgetting the words to his songs. The worst night I remember was one night as I looked through the smoke and the haze towards the front of the stage, he turned to the side and barfed on the stage in the middle of a song and then took another swig of his beer and continued singing. I was getting a bad impression of country.

3

It was shortly after that night that Leroy rescued me from the pits of Redwood Road. He called and asked if I would be interested in getting together with him and some students from the University of Utah who wanted to start a band. He gave me the address and we went one evening to an old Victorian on the avenues in Salt Lake and met with John Fulton, John Betz and Scott Sweeten.

Fulton and Betz were friends from Pennsylvania who were at the University on acting scholarships for Shakespearean Theatre. Scott Sweeten, from Los Altos, California, had answered an ad in the school paper or on a bulletin board and had met them that way. Scott had been a weekend hippie in the Haight in San Francisco during the time that I was a weekend warrior. He was a guitar player and songwriter, as was John Betz, and that’s what they hoped to promote with this group. They had been performing at open mike sessions at coffeehouses near the University and decided to add bass and drums.

I had told myself that the next time I get involved with a serious band project, I wanted it to be with someone who could write material. With Promises-Promises, we had the recording opportunities, but no one in the band could write. These guys could write. I fell in love with their tunes that first night.

John Fulton and his wife were the ones renting the Victorian. When we arrived, they ushered me into the bathroom, where they pulled back a throw rug to reveal a trap door, which led to the bowels of the house. Unlike my now burned out whitewashed room, there were no concrete walls down there, just dirt ones. There were more rugs down there, covering the dirt floor, and a single bare light bulb and candles for lighting. No where to set up drums, in fact no room to stand. I was just there to listen. Betz and Sweeten had their acoustic guitars down there and Fulton had a conga drum and tambourine. Leroy and I just lay back on the comfortable rugs and drank beers, smoked pot and let them entertain us. Scott Sweeten had already seen Leroy and I playing with PBS, so he knew what we could do. After that night, we decided to form a group and eventually called it Back Home.

Leroy was a folkie, fresh from the Hootenannies, and I was a beatnik, precursors to the hippies, so we meshed well with the influences of the other three, Dylan, The Byrds, John Lennon, The Grateful Dead, The Band and of course, the short-lived Buffalo Springfield. In the beginning we played mainly their original tunes, as well as some written by Leroy. Later on, it became apparent that if we wanted to play clubs and parties, we would have to play covers. That happens to most bands, however, we started a long tradition for Back Home that if you weren’t playing an original tune you at least had to play an original arrangement.

At some point, John Fulton dropped out of the group because he didn’t play an instrument and we couldn’t afford to carry him. We did lose some of that original flavor that he brought to performances as he and Betz strutted the stage like cheerleaders, using their acting ability.

I suggested that we replace him with a piano/organ player that I knew from the old days, playing in the Salt Lake club scene, named Hal Christensen. By this time, John Betz and Scott Sweeten had become roommates at an apartment complex and we were able to use the clubhouse as a practice room. We had Hal come over for an audition and it worked out very well. This also meant that we had three people in the group who had played the Salt Lake club scene for a long time and had connections.

During this period, my daughter Dana had been born in March of 1972 and I had been working for the State of Utah for a year and a half. Leroy had a new son and managed a grocery store for his father and, in fact, that’s where he had met John Betz, who was one of his employees. Scott and John were still students at the University and worked at part time jobs. Hal had just returned from the road playing the Nevada casinos and needed to work five nights a week. Hal, Leroy and I were the only married members of the group and Leroy was the only one who owned a house. After the fire, my sister initially came to live with us to help with rent in a new apartment. Then she abruptly eloped the same weekend that Dana was born, so I had to find a smaller place to live.

Watching Dana come into the world was a very meaningful experience. I had not had that opportunity with my son, Troy. Susan woke me up and said that she thought it was time to go to the hospital. Her bag was already packed so it was not hectic at all, but very calm. After arriving at the hospital, she was in labor for only about an hour and then we went into the delivery room together. I held her hand while we watched Dana being born by way of a mirror behind the doctor’s head. The lighting was very subdued and everything was calm and organized. The doctor’s and nurses seemed to move in slow motion. I had the distinct impression of a spiritual presence in the room and as Dana’s body cleared the womb it seemed to merge with the spirit. At first she refused to breathe and was turning blue. The nurse held her up and slapped the bottoms of her feet and then she began to cry, which forced her to breathe. I felt I had witnessed a miracle. That experience helped to form my opinion about abortion. Life does not begin at conception or even at any time within the womb. The biology is not a human until the soul is merged with it after leaving the mother’s womb. That’s why the miscarriage that we had before